The Importance of Inbound Marketing

If you want to effectively market your business in today’s competitive marketplace, you’ll need to employ inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is about organically growing a following of prospects by offering them something of value. This marketing strategy is particularly important for small start-ups who want to increase their traffic.

An effective inbound marketing strategy employs carefully crafted website content, social media content and engaging YouTube videos in order to generate a loyal following of prospective customers. The more value you can add to your business through your inbound marketing efforts, the more people will want to take part in the buzz you are generating around your business. In time, you will gradually increase traffic to your website and enter the viral marketing realm with your marketing efforts.

Website Content

A large part of your inbound strategy will be to build content on your website. One common way to build content on a small business website is to start a blog and update it two to three times per week. Maintaining an active blog will generate a buzz around your business. However, you need to produce valuable content that people will want to read and share with their friends. Integrating social media sharing into your blog will enable readers to share your blog with their social networking contacts. In this way, your inbound marketing efforts will intertwine with your other inbound strategies to draw more traffic to your website. While you may not enter the viral marketing realm with website content, you will surely generate a buzz if people start sharing your posts.

Another effective way to build content on your website is to provide a set of resources to your visitors for free. These resources can be anything that you think your prospective customers would find useful. For example, a small accounting firm might provide tax and accounting resources on their website to help people with their taxes. Enable users to share these resources via their social networks directly from your website and you will be generating a great deal of traffic to your website.

Social Media

Nurturing leads on social media is an important part of any inbound marketing strategy. As a small business, you can build a loyal following on social media websites if you carefully build relationships. Offer your followers useful resources, link to interesting articles and blog posts and do not be afraid to interact. Use video sites such as YouTube to enter the viral marketing realm. People love watching videos and you should actively pursue this avenue to reach prospective customers and increase traffic to your website. Social media can tie your inbound strategy together so that everything comes full circle. You will be sharing your blog posts, resources and videos via your social networks and those will in turn be shared with others thus creating a huge network of sharing that will result in traffic to your website.

As you can see, having an inbound marketing strategy is key to your success as a small business. Start-ups can effectively establish themselves and become well known in their communities through their marketing efforts as they work to build trust and establish relationships.